Summary:

This ambitious novel presents unusual events ten years after an international adoption.  Because of the Chinese one-child policy, Chinese peasant woman Xiao Lu abandons her second daughter Chun in a rural market, knowing that the child will be sent to an orphanage. An American couple adopt the child, calling her Katie. As a celebration for Katie’s tenth birthday, they return to southwest China, hoping to meet the birth mother.  

In a series of unusual events, they find Xiao Lu, and it is, at first, a joyous event. Troubles mount, however, as the birth mother wants Katie to stay with her, and Katie feels a mystical bond between them. Xiao Lu, having left her husband, now lives as a hermit in a hut on the slopes of The One Hundred Mile Mountain. She sweeps the 100 steps of The Elephant Temple daily and practices calligraphy in her hut.  

Pep and Clio Macy, having married late, could not get pregnant. The novel satirizes them as aging Yuppies, spoiled and materialistic. Clio wears a Movado watch worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The family’s cockerpoo has been boarded at home. Katie dislikes being the only Chinese American in her private school.  

After the birth mother has been found, the mood of the book changes. Xiao Lu wants her child returned, and the Macys fear that they are in danger. In the last 100 pages, nature itself attacks the Americans with snakes, monkeys, bats, a huge millipede, and even the weather. Pep is injured and receives rough, traditional medical treatment from a monk; it appears to be effective, however, in healing his heart physically and spiritually—a resonance with the book’s title. Katie becomes more and more like Xiao, learning calligraphy and some Chinese language. When Xiao is grievously injured by the monkeys, the Macys effectively care for her, and previous conflicts are resolved.

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Summary:

A woman reminisces about and with a child she chose not to have. It would have been born in winter, in a time of financial hardship, perhaps to have been given up for adoption. Sorrow for the child that never was causes the woman to swear devotion to her living children, yet she does not seem to regret her decision.

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Many are familiar with these stories from the author's practice as a midwife among the urban poor in London's East End in the 1950s.  Each piece stands alone as a story about a particular case. Many of them are rich with the drama of emergency interventions, birth in complicated families (most of them poor), home births in squalid conditions, and the efforts of midwives to improve public health services, sanitation, and pre- and post-natal care with limited resources in a city decimated by wartime bombings.  As a gallery of the different types of women in the Anglican religious order that housed the midwives and administered their services, and the different types of women who lived, survived, and even thrived in the most depressing part of London, the book provides a fascinating angle on social and medical history and women's studies.

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Minna Bernays is the younger sister of Martha, Sigmund Freud's wife. Her own fiancé has died and by 1895, she is reduced to joining her sister’s family in Vienna because she has abandoned her position as a companion to a demanding, prejudiced aristocrat. The six Freud children love her, but she finds them exhausting and undisciplined. Obsessed with order, housework, and social standing, and possibly suffering from psychosomatic ailments, Martha is happy to leave the care of the children to Minna. She disapproves of her husband’s theories about sexual frustration as a cause of mental distress and refuses to discuss his ideas. Nevertheless, Martha is well aware that growing anti-semitism hampers her husband’s career, and she is eager for him to succeed: he could consider a conversion of convenience, like the composer Gustav Mahler.

Minna finds herself drawn to Sigmund for his intellect and his novel ideas. She is also attracted to him physically, and he to her. She resists the temptation, but he does not and actively pursues her, inducing her to try cocaine too. He justifies it - the sex and the drugs - as necessities for mental and physical well-being and he rejects the guilt that, he claims, so-called civilization would impose.

She tries to leave by finding another job as a ladies’ companion in Frankfurt, but he follows her there. They escape for an idyllic holiday to a hotel in Switzerland, then he brings her back to the family home. But his ardor cools and she is wounded, displaced by his enthusiasm for Wilhelm Fliess and Lou Andreas-Salomé.

Soon she discovers that she is pregnant, and Freud sends her away to a “spa” for an abortion, but at the last moment, she decides to keep her baby. Sadly she miscarries and returns to the Freud family with whom she remains for more than four decades until her death in 1941.

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This story centers on Lena, an immigrant teen from Ukraine, whose entire family has been traumatized and uprooted by family deaths during a violent pogrom.  Relocated to Chicago, in a tiny apartment on Bittersweet Place, the family struggles to survive in the years prior to World War I. Wineberg’s tale of disrupted life and resettlement is weighted by formidable issues that stretch beyond the ordinary range of family experiences. 

Lena, the intelligent, highly observant and resilient adolescent, narrates an unvarnished tale of survival for the extended family clustered together in this strange new world, but especially for herself.  While the family’s economic and financial circumstances are difficult, her own life is made worse by an unkind teacher, mean-spirited classmates, and hormonal impulses.  Her uncle touches her inappropriately, a favorite uncle goes mad, a cousin dies, and her mother, who is unfamiliar with the new world setting and mores, drives her crazy. 

Nevertheless, Lena is a clear-eyed survivor exhibiting a surprising toughness of character and determination. For example, her introduction to sex is far more direct than might occur with most girls of that time.  In addition, when her teacher fails cruelly to support her artistic talents, she shows amazing defiance.   When she discovers that her father has a beautiful female friend, undoubtedly a lover, her consideration of this circumstance does not render the crushing blow that might be expected.  In retrospect she is more adult, more mature than most young women might be in each of these situations.  She is a remarkable young woman with a spirited edge.

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The writer opens the volume by discussing the ways in which the poetry created by the affected person differs from the narrative form of describing the experience of illness—the classic “pathography.”  The essays in the collection demonstrate, by using examples, some of the unique qualities of the poem as an alternative to a prose narrative progression as well as the ambiguities introduced by the language of poetry. The discussions of the poetry presented provide the reader with guidance to the acceptance of poems in their “own terms” in order to understand the poet’s internal sense of the meaning of illness.  By allowing new and different information to become available for consideration the careful reader may gain new insights into the lives of those who are ill or disabled.

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Eric Calhoune is known to his classmates as "Moby" because of the extra weight he has carried since grade school.  Though his mother is young and athletic, he has inherited the body type of the father he's never known.  Now, in high school, the fat is turning to muscle under the discipline of hard swim team workouts.  But that transformation has been slow in coming, since for some time Eric has taken on a private commitment to "stay fat for Sarah Byrnes."  Sarah, whose name is a painful pun, was severely burned as a small child not, as we are given to believe early on, because of an accident, but because of a cruel and crazy father who stuck her face and hands into a woodstove in a moment of rage.  She has lived with him and his threats for some time; that and her disfiguring scars have made her tough, smart, and self-protective.  Eric and she became friends as social outcasts.  Well-matched intellectually and in their subversive wit, they write an underground newspaper together.  Sarah, however, lands suddenly in the hospital, speaking to no one, making eye contact with no one.  Eric faithfully visits her and, per nurses' instructions, keeps up a running one-sided conversation as if she could hear him.  As it turns out, she can.  She is faking catatonia because the hospital is a safe place, and she has chosen this as an escape route from her father.  Eric and a sympathetic coach/teacher go to great lengths to find Sarah's mother-who, it turns out, can't bring herself to be involved in her daughter's life because of her own overwhelming shame.  Ultimately the father is apprehended, and Sarah, nearly eighteen, is taken into the coach's home and adopted for what remains of the childhood she bypassed long before.  In the course of this main plot, other kids enter the story and in various ways come to terms with serious issues in their own lives, some of which are aired in a "Contemporary American Thought" course where no controversy is taboo.

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This novel interweaves facts about the history of genetics with compelling fictional characters and plots in two connected stories. The primary story traces the life and work of the fictional Benedict Lambert, brilliant 20th Century geneticist, and an achondroplastic dwarf; his research is to discover the gene mutation which has caused his condition. He is also the great-great-great nephew of Gregor Mendel.

The life and genetic work of Gregor Mendel comprise the second story. Intersecting with Gregor Mendel's 19th Century scientific experiments to artificially fertilize pea plants is Lambert's affair with married librarian Jean Piercey. When Jean becomes pregnant, she decides on termination after learning from Benedict that there is "a fifty-fifty change of ending up like me . . . a second Benedict, another squat and crumpled creature betrayed by mutation and the courtly dance of chromosomes . . . " (180).

By the novel's end, Mendel's work has been published, and dismissed; Benedict Lambert has discovered the location of the gene mutation which causes achondroplastic dwarfism, publishes the results in Nature, and is asked to make a presentation on "the New Eugenics". Jean regrets the abortion, and wants Benedict's child, but a ?normal" one. In an attempt to help Jean in her quest, Benedict uses his genetic knowledge, his laboratory privileges, and his sperm without the knowledge or consent of Jean's husband.

In the lab with eight of Jean's fertilized embryos Lambert must decide: "Four of the embryos are proto-Benedicts, proto-dwarf; the other four are, for want of a better word normal. How should he choose?" The results of this scientific and personal act of fertilization are unexpected and tragic.

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This book is exactly what it claims to be in the title. Dr. Ofri gives us fifteen clinical tales, each of which describes a lesson she has learned from a patient or from her own experience as a patient. It is an extension of her first book, Singular Intimacies: On Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue (see this database) and relates to her experiences after she completes residency training at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, to which she eventually returns as a staff physician. Three of the stories are examples of how a physician experiences the patient role, including one in which she relates an early personal experience to that of a patient she cares for ("Common Ground").

Since Ofri served as several locum-tenens, some of the stories take her to rural communities and small towns but most concern experiences with patients at Bellevue in clinics or in the hospital. She also discusses the challenges and limitations of teaching the next generation of doctors at Bellevue ("Terminal Thoughts").

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Summary:

This edited anthology, which includes poems, essays, short stories, and other creative forms (e.g., a radio diary, a letter to a social service agency), is organized into sections that include Body and Self, Diagnosis and Treatment, Womanhood, Family Life and Caregiving, Professional Life and Illness, and Advocacy. Most works found their way into this collection through a call for submissions, although a few selections are well known, such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "So You're Going to Have a New Body !," or an excerpt from Rachel Naomi Remen's Kitchen Table Wisdom (see annotations). In addition, the anthology also includes essays by scholars such as Arthur W. Frank and Rita Charon, who theorize gendered illness narratives.

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